Ignoring the giggles as she struggled to put her gym shoes
back on, Lori Ann shoved her bodysuit into her satchel and
left the ladies' shower without glancing at any of her
classmates. Three weeks doing low-impact aerobics, and these
skinny witches still acted like they'd never seen a woman her
size doing exercises before. It was infuriating, but she knew
better than to let any of them know they'd gotten her upset.

At 435 pounds, Lori Ann Lessun was the largest woman
Megabod Health Club had ever seen. Pear-shaped, with a rear
that shelved out and pushed the rolls of her back up, she'd
always been obese. But that didn't mean she wasn't as serious
as any of the effortlessly slender bimbos who comprised the
rest of her aerobics class. Ever since she was old enough to
realize that fat meant second-class citizenship, Lori had
fought her size. Her new club membership, purchased at the
start of the holiday season, was only the latest battle in her
ongoing war against avoirdupois.

Pushing her way into the evening darkness, she made her way
to her mini-van, stoking her anger. The more pissed off she
felt, the less hungry she got, so in a way, these stuck-up
bitches were doing her a favor. Without that anger roiling
her stomach, she'd be famished from all her exertions.

She tossed her satchel onto the passenger seat, then hefted
herself behind the wheel. It was then she noticed the flyer
behind her windshield wiper. Bright orange, it shouted its
message through the glass:

"DESPERATE TO LOSE WEIGHT?

"Have you tried every trick in the diet book? Every
exercise known to man or woman? Every pill that the
druggist has to offer? Unsuccessfully?

She was tempted to toss the thing, but something told her
not to. As a lifelong dieter, she'd grown familiar with all
manner of hype. But she'd never seen an ad before that
acknowledged the possibility of even the slightest weight
gain. The honesty was kind of refreshing.

Driving out of the lot, she didn't notice that her van had
been the only vehicle blessed with this luminous leaflet.

Once she got home, Lori doffed her sweats for a less
constricting muumuu, grabbed a bottle of club soda and some
Hain's cheddar rice cakes, then called the number from the
leaflet. The voice that answered was deep male and resonant,
like an FM deejay's. "Ample Services," it said. "Could you
please hold?" Before she could answer, taped music washed
through the headphone: something about being in love with a
fat girl. What the hell was this?

Before she could hang up, the voice returned. "Thanks for
waiting," it said. "What can I do for you?"

"Heard about your new weight loss program," she explained.
"I was just calling to get a few more details."

"Easily done," the voice said. "We'll send a rep over."
With that, they clicked off line, and Lori was left holding a
buzzing receiver.

"Fool," she sniped. "You forgot to ask for my name and
address!" Placing the phone back on its hook, she grabbed a
rice cake and proceeded to eat her low-cal dinner. Before she
could finish, the doorbell rang.

Even through a distorting peephole, the man in the hallway
looked pretty good. Mid-twenties, tall, crew-cut blond hair,
a look of rugged boyishness. Lifting his carrying case, he
held its label in front of the peephole and smiled. "Ample
Services," she read aloud. "How'd they know where to find
me?" Then it hit her: from the health club. That leaflet
had been aimed straight at her.

You had admire such canny salesmanship. Besides, it wasn't
every day a man so attractive showed up at her front door.
Unlatching the deadbolt, she invited the Ample salesman into
her apartment.

He was neatly dressed in grey Dockers and a blue polo shirt
with the company logo over his shirt pocket. Showing off a
set of blinding teeth, the Ample salesman started in like they
were long-lost acquaintances, seeing each other for the first
time in years.

"Lori!" he began, kneeling on the living room rug with his
case in front of him. "Delightful to be invited up here!
Know exactly why you called, and I know I can be of help.

"You're tired of being the size you are. Of knowing that
the men all around you are incapable of seeing how beautiful
you are. Just because you're a teensy bit bigger than the
national norm. . ."

"Teensy," Lori snorted. "You see how huge I am! How can
you even use the word?"

"All things are relative," the salesman said, rummaging
through his case. "The average weight in this country
continues to climb despite all efforts. At the same time a
skinnier and skinnier ideal is promoted. Who's to say what is
truly 'fat'?" Pulling a business card out of his shirt
pocket, he handed it to Lori. "But I've been pretty rude.
Not fully introducing myself."

The card read:

"Jason Lukra

"Ample Services

"We'll make a big difference in your life!"

"So you've got a weight loss program that works," she said
skeptically.

"Most weight loss programs work for a time," the salesman
told her, as he spread a row of pamphlets in the small space
left on Lori's loveseat (the rest, of course, being taken up
by Lori). "And they all fail in the long run. What we
guarantee is a minuscule percentage of body fat gain."

"'Minuscule,'" Lori repeated.

"At Ample Services, we guarantee a one percent weight gain
over the first year after your loss. Nothing more after that,
as long as you follow a mainstream diet."

One percent - why, that was nothing! Say she got down to
200 pounds; that'd be a gain of only two pounds. She'd never
done that well after a diet!

"So how much to you think you can get me to lose?" Lori asked.

"Don't think of it as loss," he corrected. "That's too
negative. Think of it as attaining a new weight."

"And that 'new weight' will be?"

"Let's just say that you'll be pleasantly surprised."

Yeah, right, she thought. So just how much was this wonder
weight change program gonna cost her?

"Not a thing," Jason told her. "At least for the first year.
We're so confident that you'll be satisfied with the New You
that we won't bill you for twelve months!" He then named a
price that was one-half the cost of her current year's
membership at Megabod.

She'd once spent five times that amount for a year of Weight
Watchers: her decision was a foregone conclusion. But before
she signed any contracts, she let young Mr. Lukra go through
his whole spiel. Wasn't often she had someone so good looking
in her apartment.

Ample Services' new "program" turned out to be a body wrap
that she slept in: yards of foot wide bandage that she would
use once, then discard next morning. She'd look like an obese
mummy, but then she'd done stupider things before in the
pursuit of weight loss. And if it didn't work, she was out
nothing but some comfortable nights in bed.

Turned out she was wrong on that last, though. Soon as she
hit her queen-sized bed swaddled in wrapping that vaguely
smelled like a thigh cream she'd once unsuccessfully tried,
she conked out. Her dreams were vivid and colorful, but when
she woke, all memory of them vanished. All that lingered was
the hint of a tune that she was sure she'd heard before.

Rolling out of bed, feeling slightly muzzy, she didn't
remember her wrapping until she'd pulled out her first can of
Diet Pepsi. Overnight, the bandages had disappeared. There
wasn't a single strip on her body. Had she removed them in
her sleep?

If so, she'd discarded them pretty efficiently because she
couldn't find any of them.

Shrugging, she started to dress for work. Once she pulled
her panties up, she got the surprise of her life.

They were loose! Where once the elastic of her 6X panties
used to bite into her thighs, they now flapped freely. She
actually had to use the belt on her nylon slacks to keep them
from slipping down. Her blouse was a size too big. As was
her bra.

Damn! Lukra's wrapping actually seemed to be working! She
drove to the university in a daze. Seated behind her desk in
Financial Affairs, it was an effort keeping her mind on the
job. how much had she lost? How much would she lose? Maybe
she should check herself on the scales at the club. Minutes
before she could leave to do this, she looked up to Jason
Lukra standing on the other side of the counter.

"Miz Lessun!" he beamed. "You look wonderful! Doing okay
are we?"

"So far," she answered. "What can I do for you?"

"Thought I might ask you out to lunch," he told her. "If
you haven't any other commitments, that is."

Other commitments? Jeez, this guy could sell anything! She
could barely remember the last time she'd gone to lunch with
anyone. Smiling, she shook her head and accepted his
invitation.

They went to a Hunan buffet, where she ate her first full
meal in months. Crab Rangoon. Pot stickers. Shrimp rolls.
General Tso chicken. Hunan beef. She had a taste of each,
with Jason's encouragement. "Your body won't ask for any more
than it needs," he said. "Listen to it, and you'll be
transformed into a woman beyond your wildest dreams."

"This part of the program?" she asked, and he nodded his head.

Sounded like new age hooey to Lori. But she was willing to
put up with it when the man spouting it was so charming. By
the end of the week, when she'd dropped over seventy pounds
from her frame, she began to think she was underestimating
Lukra. Each day he'd taken her to a luncheon buffet where
she'd surpassed herself every time, yet she'd managed to lose
close to a sixth of her old weight.

Her loss slowed down a bit after that first week, but she
didn't mind. They started spending their evenings together,
dining at some of the city's finest eateries, Lori wearing
revamped outfits that hadn't fit her in ages. By the time
fall semester ended at work and the office prepped to shut
down for the rest of December, she was into the upper range of
Lane Bryant. And puzzled co-workers had finally noticed her
enough to ask, "Have you lost weight?"

Once out of the inquiring eyes of her peers, she started to
more quickly lose weight again - as if her body were more
comfortable accomplishing its amazing transformation in
private. Christmas Eve, she was at 200 pounds, a weight she'd
never reached before in a diet. Her figure was almost an
hourglass. Her belly no longer pushed past her breasts, and
while her hips remained the largest part of her, they didn't
even scrape the armrests of an average-sized chair.

More amazing still, even with her sudden loss, Lori's skin
was as firm as if she'd always been her present weight. Must
be something in the wrapping to tighten it, she thought, as
she examined herself in her newly purchased full-length
mirror. At least three times a day she did a full inventory
of herself, and if this was vanity, Lori wasn't going to
apologize for it. Not after years of shame every time she
passed her reflection.

Mentioning this to Jason that Xmas, he shook his head.
"Lori," he said, "you'd be beautiful at twice your old weight.
Sometimes I think that the worst thing we do is take away a
woman's right to feel attractive if she's the least bit
plump."

"And yet you work for a diet company," she answered. "Isn't
that the least bit contradictory?"

"Ample Services is more than a diet company," he told her.
"We do even bigger business, serving plus-sized clients with
needs that mainstream business doesn't recognize. To be
frank, that's the part of the business that I prefer."

"So you're saying that you'd still be attracted to me if I
hadn't lost any weight," Lori said in disbelief.

With that, Jason grabbed her hands. "I'm a salesman," he
said. "I'm used to telling people what they want to hear.
But I'll be honest: if you hadn't called, wanting to be thin,
I'd never have recommended it for you."

Later, when she'd try to pin the moment, Lori always returned
to this instant as the time she fell in love with Jason Lukra.
That moment when he said to her that he thought she was
attractive both fat and thin, when he even had her wishing
momentarily that she'd never lost a pound. She enjoyed the
time she'd spent with him before (he had an in at every decent
restaurant in the area), but this was like nothing she'd ever
felt before.

He bought her a strapless evening gown for Christmas.
"Something for you to wear at New Year's," the young salesman
said, as she held up a black silk garment more suited to a
runway model than her.

"I'd never fit into that," she demurred, trying to calculate
just how thin she'd have to be to squeeze into it.

"By New Year's Eve, you'll be able to," he assured her.

Jason was right, of course.

December 31st, and Lori was all the way down to 120 pounds,
a weight that she hadn't seen since she'd first hit puberty.
Trim and buff, she looked like she'd been spending her life at
the health club, though in reality she hadn't been to Megabod
in weeks. A single roll of wrapping was left, and she was
unsure if she would be applying it that night or not.
Depended how the evening went with Jason.

Dressed and made up an hour before Jason's arrival, she stood
and examined herself intently. The mirror showed a tall,
leggy blond with short hair and the elegant look of a heroine
from some chic sixties suspense movie. Her breasts were firm
and just big enough to announce her womanliness; her torso
flat and well toned. Her hips and legs looked like a
dancer's. Jason's dress fit her perfectly, as if he had
foreseen every contour on her new body.

The image was so plastically perfect, a life-sized magazine
ad, that she was almost afraid to move - as if turning to
answer Jason's knock would utterly destroy the picture perfect
woman she'd become. Still, she stood unmoving for several
beats before she went and let her boyfriend in the apartment.
Soon as she saw him, she felt childish for even momentarily
standing him up.

Dressed in a tux, five pound box of chocolates under his right
arm, Jason whistled as she opened the door. "Looks like the
dress fit, after all," he said, eyeing her from top to bottom.
Lori blushed, then took the candy box from him. She opened it
and made a sizable dent in the first tier without even
noticing.

He took her to their favorite restaurant, and on their way
in his car, she finished off the box. A nice aperitif.

The next three hours were spent dining and drinking each other
in. By now, she no longer stopped to consider how extreme her
daily food intake had become. She listened to her body's
demands, and it hadn't steered her wrong yet!

They hit the clubs next, and on the dance floor of the city's
hottest nightclub, Jason proposed. The perfect cap to a
wonderful night. Of course, she said yes.

"Tomorrow," he said. "We'll get married first day of your
new year." All around them, well-heeled couples were gyrating
to a mambo version of "Auld Lang Syne."

"Today, you mean," she said, smiling prettily, then kissing
him long and deeply. No way were they going to be able to get
the paperwork done on New Year's, but she had no qualms about
registering on the second.

Her new year. In a new body. With a loving husband. Who'd
have thought she'd be experiencing this? There was, she knew,
one small catch: that tiny gain over the next year. What was
one percent of 120? Little over a pound. She could
definitely live with that.

Waking in Jason's arms late that morning (no late-night
mummification for her that night!), she was immediately struck
by the certainty that she'd already regained that small
percentage. Stumbling into her fiance's bathroom, she looked
for Jason's digital scale under the sink. When she got on it,
the scale read 121.

It could have been just a matter of two scales giving
slightly different readings, but Lori knew better. Especially
after considering how much she'd eaten last night. The pound
was back, alright, even if it wasn't observable on her trim
frame. Maybe it was time to stop listening to her stomach so
much and cut back on the multi-course dining.

Easier resolved than done, she discovered. For by the time
Jason rose to put together a healthy-sized brunch, Lori was
famished. She scarfed down two plates' worth of cheese and
green pepper omelette, six sausage patties, several pieces of
foccaccio bread and three cups of Royal Kona coffee with cream
and sugar. All afternoon, she spent lying on the couch with
Jason, picking at Merkt cheese and crackers, drinking egg nog
and working on an even bigger box of chocolates. They watched
romantic comedies from the thirties together, and Lori was
shocked to realize how much bigger than her many of the women
were in those films.

The following day, she packed her possessions and moved into
Jason's duplex. Her fat clothes, she boxed for Goodwill, and
Jason promised to take care of them. That afternoon, they
went for a blood test, then celebrated with a private seven-course meal that lasted most of the night.

Jason's place was roomy, filled with sturdy armless furniture
and a vast collection of old records. He loved old rock and
roll, blues and boogie woogie, blasting this archaic old music
as he worked in the kitchen. Every once in a while, Lori
would catch the lyrics of a song and realize that the singer
was rhapsodizing about some fat woman.

When she returned to work, her co-workers were goggle-eyed
over the new Lori. With Jason's help, she concocted a tale of
radical liposuction, which was just a familiar enough concept
to be convincing.

It was a struggle to remain focused on her work, she
discovered. The whole day, images of her meals with Jason
kept reappearing, and regular trips to the floor's snack
machine weren't enough to banish them. Her co-workers watched
these treks with cynical amusement, but Lori barely noticed.
Though she spent her full lunch hour eating, she still felt
empty when she returned to her desk.

By the time she got back to Jason's duplex (she wouldn't think
of it as theirs until they made it legal), Lori was ravenous.
Demolishing a pan of lasagna, a loaf of Pane bread, and a
large salad piled high with blue cheese and olives, she
totally lost herself in the sensation of eating.

It wasn't until after Jason left on a sales call that she
remembered the bathroom scale. She was lazing in the living
room, munching on snack food and listening to one of Jason's
music collections. As she lifted the crumbs from the bottom
of a twenty-four ounce bag of ruffled Lay's, she heard the
song from her call to Ample Services, a male rockabilly singer
bragging about his love of fat women:

"I like 'em bulgin'/From too much indulgin'."

The lyrics were enough to jolt her out of her thoughtless
noshing. Dropping her bag, Lori dashed to the bathroom,
stepped on the scales and read her newest digital weight.
122.

Another pound? How could she? A wave of fear coursed through
her, followed by the thought: what would Jason think of her?

She couldn't let him know, but also couldn't afford to gain
another ounce. Already, she could see her fine-toned stomach
had smoothed just the slightest. He'd be so disappointed if
she let it go any further.

And, yet, hadn't her fiance said that he found her just as
attractive fat as he did now? Just date talk - no man really
thought like that! It was just another salesman's line.

Or was it?

That night when he returned, Jason came bearing a package
of Vienetta ice cream. Tomorrow, she told herself, she'd
start on a sensible diet.

Next day, it was just as difficult to resist temptation,
though. Over the past month, under Jason's urgings, she'd
gotten into the habit of eating most everything that came her
way. It was not going to be easy to break away from her old
"program."

To her credit, Lori tried. And for two days, she even managed
to hold to her resolve. Stomach crying to be fed throughout
the work day, she stuck to sugarless gum and the old reliable
rice cakes, kept to single portions at night. If Jason
noticed her new abstinence, he didn't say a word.

Five days after his proposal, the day of their wedding, Lori
finally got up enough nerve to step back on that bathroom
scale. Her present weight, it told her, was 126 pounds. Even
dieting, she was continuing to gain weight.

A wave of shame washed over her. Already, she'd managed to
blow the Ample Service program. She was hopeless!

Hold on. For two days, she'd been responsible and abstinent,
and she'd still continued to pack on the pounds. Who was at
fault here? Six pounds was considerably more than one percent
of 120. For the first time in her life, she was not accepting
any responsibility for her diet failure; it was the program's
fault.

She confronted Jason with the math over coffee. Nonplused,
he just sat back and said, "Honey, I hate to disagree with
you, but there's nothing out of line here. The contract
states one percent over a year, and that's what you've been
gaining. One percent on a daily basis."

Lori was floored. "Daily!" she gasped, tipping over her mug.
"For a year! Add a pound a day, and I'll be fatter than when
I started!"

She dashed out of the room, slammed the bedroom door. How
could he deceive her like this? Play games with her than
claim to love her? She shouted her question through the door.

"I did it to make you happy," he protested. "If only for
a couple days. Do you know what it's been like to watch you
grow so small? To help you lose all those curves? It's been
awful!"

"Awful?" she repeated, cracking open the door.

"I told you I thought you were gorgeous when I met you," Jason
said. "And I still believe it. Some people were meant to be
fat; they look their best that way. You're one of them."

"So this diet was all a hoax," Lori accused.

"Not a hoax - a way for us to spend time together. For me
to get close enough to propose."

"You deceived me."

"What lover doesn't?" Jason answered. "That's part of the
romance. Honesty comes only when the relationship's matured."

"So tell me the truth then. Am I going to gain all my weight
back?"

"All your weight and more," Jason said. "I'll be truthful.
But if you're still willing, I still want to marry you."

Shutting the bedroom door again, Lori sat and thought. The
problem with even trying to argue with Jason, she decided, was
his smoothness. She had to get away and hash this out for
herself.

She packed a suitcase and headed for the nearest motor lodge.
Three nights of bad teevee reception and family-sized pizzas
set her straight, though. Already, she missed their time
together. The looks he gave her across the dinner table. His
sense of humor. The way he touched her after she'd finished
eating.

Even at her thinnest, she realized, he'd always focused on
those parts of her that were fleshiest. Her thighs and
buttocks. Her breasts. Gain back the weight, and that would
just give him more to pay attention to. She'd been fat all
her life, but she'd never been fat and happy. Her weight was
gonna return. Why blow her shot at happiness?

The day they finally married, Lori was up to 134 pounds.
Tossing aside her diet, she readied herself to grow back into
her old outfits. (They were, Jason revealed, still in the
trunk of his car.) Unencumbered by any guilt and abetted by
Jason's encouragement, she quickly fell back into the
gluttonous style of dining she'd developed in December.

Married life was like one long romantic fugue, each night
of love and food and sex slipping into the next, each day
passing by so quickly that she barely noticed how much
snacking she was doing on the job. The bigger she grew, the
more attentive Jason became. By spring, she was already back
to 284 pounds. The supermodel days were over: her old pear
shape had re-emerged. With hips that edged towards fifty-five
inches and a belly with a circumference of forty-eight, there
was no way anybody was going to confuse her with Kate Moss.

And yet, there were times when she almost anticipated her
return to her old weight. The way her husband looked at her,
she practically felt liberated as a fat woman. Maybe it was
just more salesmanship on his part, but if it was, it was
clear that he believed in what he was selling.

As she regained her weight, her flesh once again found the
textures that she'd known all her life. The stretch marks on
her pendulous breasts. The dimples on her hips and thighs.
The extra bulges on her torso. Once she'd thought of them all
as blemishes, but now they didn't look so bad.

It wasn't until May that she started to worry. She was
already up to 400 pounds, and the year wasn't even half over.
Her body was gaining twice as fast as she'd expected. Lori's
thighs were individually in the upper thirties, while her
belly swayed ahead of them at sixty-plus. Her upper arms were
almost the size of her thighs from her short-lived skinny
days. She was starting to run out of wardrobe, so she
expressed this concern to Jason.

But that was only half her worry. "I've gained back so much
already," she said. "I thought you said I'd be gaining one
percent."

"You are," he said. "But one percent of your present weight
is four times more than it was when you first started. Makes
sense that you'd be gaining more weight by now. Up to four
pounds a day."

Four pounds! And the year was only a third over! Doing some
quick multiplication, Lori came up with a staggering figure.
Four times 245 made for more than 900 pounds! The heaviest
male on medical record was in that range. 1400 pounds!

It was an impossible figure, but considering what she'd
already been through, not an inconceivable one. She called in
sick to work that day, went back to bed and brooded. By
afternoon, she came to another realization. Her math was all
fucked up.

She'd been making a kid's mistake, assuming that percentage
values were stable. But, of course, they weren't; that's how
mortgage companies made so much off of tiny percentages. The
bigger she got, the bigger the value of her percentage became.
Tumbling out of bed, she went in search of a calculator. When
she found one and did the math, she was staggered.

This time, she didn't confront her husband with her knowledge.
He'd tell her truth, but as she'd learned, Jason had a knack
for doling out only those pieces of truth he believed she
could handle. There was only one bit of info that she wanted
from him now, and that night, she laid it on him.

"I was watching this doctor on Today," she said, as they lay
in bed together, bonbon wrappers on the sheet between them.
"And it got me wondering about my health."

"The 'Obesity Is A Killer Disease' line," Jason answered.

"You telling me it's not the truth?"

"Not for Ample Services clients," he told her. "Unlike all
those diet charlatans, we refuse to sell anything that would
jeopardize a client's health. You're my wife, and I intend us
to have a long and fulsome life together."

"There's no diet that's ever going to get me thin again?"

"No," he answered. "Your body's grown too accustomed to its
weight to ever let you lose it. No more yo-yoing. Want
another helping?"

"Sure," she said, and with that, she committed herself to
the rest of her new life with Jason.

The following day, Lori gave two weeks' notice. By her last
work day, she was already twenty pounds heavier than she'd
been at her bachelorette peak. Away from the eyes of
judgmental co-workers, she took to eating in the day with the
gluttonous abandon that she'd shown at night. She knew her
insatiable appetite wasn't natural, but it was also
irrefutable.

First day of her new life as a homebody, she was interrupted
in the midst of her prolonged brunch by a knock on the door.
Standing in the hallway were two sumo-sized delivery men with
the words "Ample Stuffing" emblazoned on their multiply-Xed
shirts. Wafting around them was a variety of yummy scents.
Swiss cheese and bacon crepes. Asparagus quiche. Frittata.
Enough brunch to feed the clientele of a good-sized family
restaurant. Obviously, Jason was making sure that she'd be
kept well fed while he was at work.

The two super-sized delivery guys showed up again at
lunchtime, just as she was near polishing off their first
offering. The helpings were twice as large, but she still
managed to deplete them by the time her husband got home.

"This food," she said. "This new clothing. It's got to be
expensive."

"Ample Stuffing is a family business," he answered. "We make
plenty of money elsewhere, but this part of the business was
built so we could have a good life with our fat spouses."
What that, he held out the five pound box of chocolates that
had been become a nightly appetizer for her.

By mid-June, Lori had outgrown the size of their apartment.
At 624 pounds, she was constantly having to angle herself to
get her 84-inch hips through the doorways. Her paunch hung
ahead of her with a 70-inch measurement, which put the lowest
parts of it out of her reach. Her calves, which were
delineated neath the fabric of her custom-made bodysuit, were
divided into three tightly stretched bulges.

She hadn't left the house in over a month, but she barely
noticed the stares of those passerbys who came upon her slowly
moving form. It took three rest stops for her to get outside
to her mini-van, but once she did, Lori never looked back.
The Ample Stuffing deliverymen did all the drudgework, though
they weren't bringing any of the furniture with them, as the
new home was fixed with sturdier furnishings.

Their new domicile was a large dome house on the edge of town
with carpeted concrete floors and modular furniture. It was
arranged like a loft, with no doorways for her to outgrow. It
had a walk-down jacuzzi and a bidet, a kitchen that wouldn't
look out of place in a hotel. The entertainment area had a
voice-activated stereo home theater that was tremendous.

Lori loved it all on sight: this was a home that would fit
her even by the end of the year. In the bathroom area there
even was a digital freight scale she could use to chart her
growth.

Now, all she had to do was let herself swell to her inevitable
size. She discarded her sweats and bodysuits - an affectation
from her old health club days - in favor of more free-flowing
spaghetti strap jumpers. Gaining from six to seven pounds a
day, she was over 720 pounds by mid-year.

In her summer wear, a string of custom-made bikinis that were
constantly close to slipping off the parts they were supposed
to cover, Lori lolled around the house and ate nonstop. By
July's end, she was adding almost ten pounds each day to her
982 pound frame. The day in August that she broke a thousand
pounds, she celebrated by doubling her day's intake, eating
past their usual bedtime, watching Jason grow crazy with
desire at the sight of his gormandizing half-ton wife.

She enjoyed teasing him. Perhaps there was an element of
payback in her doing so, but she began to use her expanded
capacity to delay their conjugal time together. The longer
she ate, the more excited Jason became. She loved the feeling
of power this gave her. Sex between them was explosive,
though her frame made it difficult for the most traditional
positioning. They didn't let that stop them, though.

And so Lori's year passed - with new physical landmarks nearly
every month. By August's end, she weighed over 1370 pounds:
Guinness records weight, though she knew that she still had
many pounds to go. Seated in front of the home theater, semi-circle of food carts before her, she'd totally forgotten
living any other way. Her hips spread across the couch,
taking it up entirely, while her calves sagged and rested on
the floor. Her belly hung past her knees and draped over a
hassock in double bulges. Her upper arms had started to swell
forward, pushing her breasts into well-rounded prominence.

Despite her tremendous weight, she was still able to move
around the house, though it took the help of the two
deliverymen for her to gain the leverage to rise from the
couch and close to half an hour just for her to waddle from
one end of the room to another. She didn't move that often,
however - and why should she? Her deliveries were coming
every other hour on the hour. And even then she often cleaned
them out before they could be replenished.

When autumn hit, Lori was close to 1700 pounds. At a gain
of 17 pounds a day, she knew she wasn't far away from reaching
her first ton. She'd widened to the point where she was
barely able to meet her fingertips. Seated, her belly sagged
all the way to the floor, way below the hem of her jumper,
flattening against the carpet. She was like a great womanly
pyramid, her spreading hips a base that nearly covered the
five foot couch. Standing, the back of her thighs sagged most
of the way down her calves; her butt cheeks shelved almost a
foot past her arms' reach.

She reached her first ton in the second week of October:
her "small percentage" currently came to twenty pounds a day.
Jason had the carpet taken up and beneath it, Lori saw a set
of slots imbedded in the concrete. They replaced her couch
with a motorized, wheeled platform. Now, she was able to move
around the house without getting up. Though she still could
move on her own steam, most of the time it was too much of a
hassle to heft her forefront up and carry it. With her
platform, she could make it across the house quickly, wheel up
to their bathing area, roll onto a lift that lowered into the
tub and soak in the water luxuriantly. Within the tub lift's
controls, was a digital read-out that let her keep tabs on her
weight.

Though she still didn't talk about it with her husband, it
was obvious that Lori was getting almost as big a charge by
her weight gain as Jason. She didn't quite know when her
attitude towards her weight had undergone this 180, but the
change was undeniable. At times, when she looked at her
newest stat and realized how much she'd grown, she felt an
erotic jolt stronger than any other. More than once during a
particularly well-cooked offering, she became as aroused as
she did under Jason's ministerings.

At November's beginning, she was accumulating close to thirty
pounds a day. On Thanksgiving, she celebrated by passing a
ton-and-a-half.

That night, she thought of where she'd been a year before:
on the verge of meeting her husband, of changing her whole
orientation towards her size and food. Angry and
dissatisfied, she'd never dreamed that she could live so
happily.

"I was a fool," she said, lifting a turkey leg to her
mouth. As she did, her opposite arm swung back, pushed by her
inexorable mounds of breast fat. Even the act of putting food
to mouth was an effort these days; the rolls of fat around her
upper arms tended to make them spring back to her sides if she
didn't offer any resistance. There, they rested, pointing
right and left straight from her torso.

She'd lost sight of most of her front. Seated, all she could
see were her breasts and belly looming before her. Her
shoulders and chin rolls restricted her view to the side. She
knew her rear pushed back almost as far as her front because
it kept her seated upright on her platform. Nights when she
slept, her husband on a connecting futon, she dropped off in
this position.

For modesty's sake, she continued to wear a tie-string bikini
top - the only way she could get it on was to have Jason loop
it around her - but had given up on any other type of
clothing. Swaddled within her hundreds of pounds of fat, she
was plenty warm.

"A fool?" Jason repeated, as he carried over a tray full of
walnut stuffing.

"All those years starving myself," Lori said, once she'd
picked the leg clean. "You know, I bet if you tallied up all
the food I denied myself in my life, it still wouldn't equal
all that I've eaten this year."

"You've still got a month," Jason answered, and he lifted
a large wooden spoon full of stuffing to her lips.

And what a month it was destined to be. A year before, she'd
been wrapping herself nightly and watching her body diminish.
Seven days into December, she was adding thirty-five pounds a
day to her 3500 pound body. Her Ample Stuffing food was
arriving constantly, chopped into half-inch cubes and placed
on a chute that narrowed towards her mouth. All she could see
was food sliding towards her, and it was all that she needed
to see. Eating was all; growing was everything.

Four days before Christmas, she reached her second ton - just
like her calculations had told her she would. She was fated
to grow more than ten times the size of her pre-program
weight, and that last week would be the most wonderful of all.

Instead of deliverymen, she had Jason all day. Feeding her
more than she'd ever eaten before, encouraging her with every
bite she took. Each chew, each swallow, was like an
expression of love on her part. For the first time all year,
she started to feel herself getting full, but she refused to
stop. They slept in short shifts, then returned to the task
at hand. Her meals arrived around the clock. It was
exquisite, an orgy of eating. When New Year's came, it was
almost with a sense of anticlimax.

Final tally on the last day of the year: 4450 pounds.

Lori spanned the entire nine-by-nine foot platform, naked
flesh drooping over all four sides, belly still draped to the
floor. Her legs were lost between her paunch and voluminous
ass, constricted between the walls of fat pressing on both
sides. Walking, she could only take the tiniest steps; it was
like trying to push your way through a very crowded party.
Lori's thighs had blended with her butt, so that the only
sense of limb that was detectable was in her multiply ringed
calves. Her upper arms had comparably vanished against her
sides, two large sagging rims of flesh that likewise kept her
arms into outstretched position.

Over the past week Jason had taken to photographing her from
all angles. The large-sized photos had been framed and hung
high on the wall for her to see, though there was no way any
one picture could capture her entirely. She was like some
over-stuffed symbol of appetite; vast jiggling female flesh
billowed all around her. Her head perched between her
mountainous shoulders had taken on her old pear shape, chins
and cheeks swelling. Her belly and breasts ballooned way
ahead of her, bulges and folds appearing in new spots whenever
she shifted herself even the slightest.

Good thing all the electronics were voice activated, Lori
thought, and sensitive enough to pick up commands made with a
mouth full of food. Though parts of her moved all the time
(each chew and swallow sent waves throughout her tonnage) the
only exercises she did regularly were finger touches and deep
breathing. Quite a change from her health club days. Despite
this, she felt fitter than she'd ever been.

On the screen of their home theater, the big ball was
dropping. Dick Clark was wishing everyone in the audience a
Happy New Year, but Jason had turned the sound off. In the
silence, Lori could have sworn she heard the band from last
year's celebration somewhere outside the house.

Scattered on the floor were the remains of Lori's New Year's
meal.

Leaning against her forefront, sinking into her paunch and
the space between her breasts, Jason kissed her on the lips.
Her prominent cheeks and swelling chins pressed against his
face, and she felt herself warming throughout her entire body.
She was now the woman she was meant to be, and it was obvious
that was more than alright with Jason.

"My appetite's gone," she said in astonishment, as the New
Year struck. There'd been days, particularly near the end,
when she'd thought that it might never subside. But for the
first time in weeks, she didn't feel hungry.

"For now at least," Jason said, holding a bottle of champagne
to her lips. "The year is up, yet you almost sound
disappointed."

She drank and considered this. Over time, she'd developed
a passion for overeating that had overridden most everything
else in her life. As this passion ebbed, she wondered what
would replace it.

But then she remembered her earlier meals with Jason, the
pleasure of good food and company. Somewhere between the
unnaturally enhanced gluttony of her past year and her earlier
fear of food was a place where she could live. Given her
current inclinations, she suspected that she'd still tend
towards the gluttony end of the scale.

What was it Jason had said when he was first selling her on
the program? No further gain after the first year "as long as
you follow a mainstream diet." Mainstream, she knew, would
always be just a snack to her.

"Not at all," she finally answered. "Just trying to figure
out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life."

"We'll figure it out," Jason said, and as he kissed her once
more, Lori knew that he was telling her the unexpurgated
truth.

"I believe you," she said, nodding her head as much as her
chins allowed. "No need for any salesman stories. We're
husband and wife all the way."

"One hundred percent," Jason said.

Lori laughed, and her teeming forefront rocked beneath her
husband. Whatever the years would bring, they were sure to be
satisfying ones.